You know, ACORN really suffered a black eye when James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles posed as a pimp and prostitute and ACORN workers in Baltimore nevertheless offered to help Giles become a first-time homebuyer under an ACORN program. After all, those Baltimore ACORN workers quite clearly were willing to aid and abet an illegal activity. As O’Keefe employer Andrew Breitbart explained in the Washington Times,

When filmmaker and provocateur James O’Keefe came to my office to show me the video of him and his friend, Hannah Giles, going to the Baltimore offices of ACORN – the nation’s foremost “community organizers” – dressed as a pimp and a prostitute and asking for – and getting – help for various illegal activities, he sought my advice.

Now, I’ve read the transcript enough to see that O’Keefe wasn’t posing as a pimp. He was posing as a law student – a graduate student – who was trying to help Giles ostensibly escape an abusive pimp and strike out on her own.

It’s also been revealed now that O’Keefe did not “dress as a pimp”. This is a significant part of the story, because ACORN was defunded and demonized based on the fact that its employees were either so stupid or so corrupt as to assist a white kid dressed in full Blaxploitation pimp outfit and his bitch to deal with taxes and buy a house.

Yes, why are we reading transcripts, exactly? How do I know that the transcript is accurate? The full and unedited videos exist, but Breitbart and O’Keefe have never released them anywhere, at any time. The public outcry and outrage over this alleged scandal last year helped to decimate an organization that existed to assist the less fortunate. All based on lies and exaggerations, it turns out.

It would be the simplest thing in the world for those unedited videos to simply be uploaded to YouTube. They won’t.

Why?

Andrew Breitbart himself explains the whole thing:

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An unhinged, palpably nervous liar. You can see his mouth going dry. Look at all of those entreaties to show the video and answer questions under oath and whatnot. That’s hardly the point. All he has to do is post the unedited videos, and he hasn’t. He won’t. It would be too damning to him.

And the question that I have here has to do with messaging – the right lied and bullshat this entire story, but it won the relevant news cycles. Here we are in the next calendar year, finding out that the whole thing is more Borat than Woodward. It’s more Ali G than Bernstein. It’s a lie. It’s being an agent provocateur to entrap someone into doing something silly.

Why didn’t the mainstream press examine this more closely? Was it to avoid seeming too “liberal”, or was it just about money and sales? Why didn’t it press Breitbart to reveal the full, unedited tape before running their “dressed as a pimp and prostitute” stories?

As it happens, neither ACORN nor any of its employees has so much as received a summons for any of this. None of this was criminal – all of it is political. I have huge questions about why ACORN was targeted, and why O’Keefe and Giles went with the whore story. I suspect it has everything to do with a ham-handed, anachronistic sheltered upper-middle-class white kid racism.

Over the past few weeks, people argued over whether someone Tweeted whether there were hostages during the non-shooter non-event at a UB Library. The bigger question I have is why a conservative propaganda outfit can put out blatant lies and not be called on it until a half a year later.

The American political left needs to get its shit together and more rapidly and more effectively combat this sort of half-assed misinformation.

The report also said that a sting-style effort to publicize the group’s allegedly illegal activities, may have broken state laws. Two conservative activists set off a firestorm in September when they posed as a pimp and a prostitute seeking financial advice and secretly videotaped Acorn employees offering advice on how the couple could hide their illicit activities and avoid paying taxes.

A few weeks ago, way up in northern New York, Democrat Bill Owens defeated Doug Hoffman, a Conservative Party candidate who drew support from the tea-steepage-pouch crowd all around the country to defeat the evil Dede Scozzafava.

The result hasn’t been finalized, and the final corrected counts are coming in, and absentee ballots are being counted as well. Every county board of elections in New York State is run with one Republican and one Democratic commissioner. If there were any anti-Hoffman shenanigans going on, the Republican commissioners would be screaming bloody murder.

Not one to just milquetoastedly play givesies-backsies, Hoffman went full wingnut with this insane, rambling letter to supporters accusing ACORN of attempting to steal the election in NY-23. The body of the letter is what one might typically expect from a disingenuous nutter, but my favorite part is this postscript:

I ran a different kind of campaign, one where Conservatives, Republicans, Libertarians, Tea Party and 9/12 activists rallied around. ACORN, the unions and Democratic Party were scared, and that’s why they tampered with the ballots of voters in NY-23. Will you please contribute today so we can show them that fair elections are the Will of the People? Thank you.

Yeah, the Democrats were so scared that they won the election. The unions were so scared, they helped Owens win the election.

“No one has touched those ballots or has access to those ballots except Board of Elections staff — and in a bipartisan manner,” he said…

…George J. Williams, Oswego County Republican chairman, said Mr. Hoffman’s assertion “is not accurate.” He said he roamed the county on Election Day and saw no evidence of tampering.

“We’re not going to take the blame because he didn’t hold his concession speech,” Mr. Williams said. “If there’s any doubt, I would never concede. I know things could happen. Did illegal things happen? No, I do not believe that.”

And it’s not over because ACORN stole an election or SEIU intimidated people. It’s over because the voters were given a stark choice between a candidate who was acutely aware – and concerned – about local issues, and a candidate who was acutely aware of what Glenn Beck’s listeners and viewers were concerned about.

In just a few days, the word ACORN has gone from being something that struck fear in the hearts of conservatives and Fox News commentators everywhere, to being the punchline of a joke.

I fully agree that there should be an investigation into ACORN’s activities based on alleged malfeasance on the part of five or six ACORN offices out of 1200 nationwide. Clearly, it’s completely reasonable to demand adherence to the law, and ACORN’s corruption must be widespread indeed when fully 4/10 of one percent of ACORN offices are discovered to give bad advice to fake gangly pimps.

My question is: where was this outrage, severing contacts when, say, $9 Billion dollars went missing in Iraq? Did anyone call for the cancellation of Haliburton Contracts? How about Blackwater? What about other organizations that have failed, like – say, the Banks and financial institutions? Where is the rush to accountability?

Easy. Blackwater and Halliburton don’t advocate for and assist the underprivileged in our society. ACORN does, and must clearly be stopped before it advocates or assists again.

The unhinged efforts by Republicans to turn ACORN into some kind of bogeyman, and to make it seem as if Obama has something to do with voter fraud, suffer another blow. And another. And for every ACORN fraud, there’s a “Young Political Majors“.